On Friday July 19, 2024, one of the greatest intellectual inspirations in the development of my own little mind sadly passed away. We did, however, unwittingly dance on his grave as he passed, just as I would have imagined he would have wanted it. A suitably loving fire and a ceremony was held in the days leading up to his death and in the night his soul finally went to the other side we were dancing on James C. Scott’s grave in ecstasy and convivial joy. RIP.
Heretic, a kind of non-aligned perspective, not to merely be contrarian; rather, it seems to me, because he simply saw things that way, and called it as he perceived it. Never met him, unfortunately, but we had a number of email exchanges, notably while I was in the Amazon, reading reviews upon the publication of his 2017 “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States”.
What kind of person with a fine academic history and career embarks on a research mission into new territory in his late 70s and concludes that “…everything I thought I knew about the “neolithic revolution” was wrong..”, and then sets about charting this new-found territory in book form? Well, that was Scott. I tried my infant idea on him that “money is virtual grain”, derived from seeing grains like a state – countable, relatively non-perishable and therefore eminently taxable; and thus instrumental in social power and stratification – and he responded with great delight, looking forward to a write-up that is yet to come.
15 years ago holding in my hands a fresh hardcover copy of “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” I felt for the first time, perhaps, that I was in the time-space I was supposed to be. Not idolising dead rock stars that belonged to my parents’ generation or finding resonance in some ancient radical writer or Romantic poet: Here was a person of my own time with views I felt I could make my own: Thank you James Scott for writing those books that you did and especially for integrating that excellent, substantial critique of literacy as another grain-like social stratification element in Chapter 6 and ½ “Orality, Writing, and Texts” in The Art of Not Being Governed. It speaks volumes and this is how it begins:
“…Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race as gardening is older than the field, painting than writing, singing than declaiming, parables than inferences, bartering than commerce…”
—Bruce Chatwin, Songlines, quoting J. G. Hamann
“…For, in its severity, the law is at the same time writing. Writing is on the side of the law; the law lives in writing; and knowing that the one means that unfamiliarity with the other is no longer possible . . . writing directly bespeaks the power of the law, be it engraved in stone, painted on animal skins, or drawn on papyrus…”
—Pierre Clastres, Society against the State
Reaching him to somewhere between his ankles and the top of his socks at best, he nevertheless made me feel less alone in the world. As one of the few marginal, renegade characters that enjoyed some degree of establishment-recognised success, he stands for me as one of the greatest white male scholars of the 20th century alongside such names as Paul Feyerabend, E.P Thompson and, well, who else is worth celebrating in that pantheon?
It was only this morning that a friend informed me, and I set about looking for obituaries. Instead I ended up revelling in various interviews and articles and I will end this little tribute, this obituary to James C Scott with a few cool quotes:
“…In Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play from 2012 Scott says that “Lacking a comprehensive anarchist worldview and philosophy, and in any case wary of nomothetic ways of seeing, I am making a case for a sort of anarchist squint. What I aim to show is that if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle. It will also become apparent that anarchist principles are active in the aspirations and political action of people who have never heard of anarchism or anarchist philosophy.”…”
– from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott – and a quote that gestures at that perspective for which I am expressing gratitude in this mini-obituary. Not because he was the only one, or the best or most radical, but because he took the time to act on that impulse to explore beyond rhetoric and remain intellectually honest to himself.
“…Scholarly work is infused these days with a deep sense of doubt about the place we’ve gotten to, and how we’ve gotten there — whether it’s global warming or extinction of species. Just this morning I was thinking that all the studies on how animals think and reason, and how they are agents, provides an interesting angle for a species — ourselves — who think of themselves as a class apart in terms of our intelligence. At some deep level I share this worry that the state forms and ecology of agrarian life that prevailed until fossil fuels were used are partly responsible for some of the problems we now face. So I was determined to go back as far as I could to look at how this thing called the state and its concentration of animals and crops and people in sedentary spaces got established in the first place….”
“…What I object to in some of the critical reviews of Against the Grain is that they seem to assume that hunters and gatherers had the option of either continuing with their existence or joining the Danish welfare state. They’re choosing, or more likely being forced to join, an agrarian autocracy of one kind or another. Insofar as the state has any welfare aspects, it’s only what is necessary to hold a population at the center that can be useful for them….”
– both these quotes appear in a 2018 interview by Francis Wade in the LA Review of Books titled “Most Resistance Does Not Speak Its Name: An Interview with James C. Scott: Francis Wade interviews James C. Scott about state resistance in Southeast Asia and beyond“.
Here are a couple of videos to enjoy a living mind, whose ideas about not being governed are immortal: